Issue 74: B&W With Paul Grund
All images courtesy of Paul Grund.
Paul Grund is a photographer and professional skateboarder from Paris, France.
He is a skilled darkroom printer and has a keen eye for the way that light can work and not work in an urban setting. Paul has a photography book which just came out called Damaged, and instead of giving you our analysis, we asked Paul to do a bit of his own.
Get your hands on issue 74, here, and get a copy of Paul Grund’s new book, Damaged, here.
‘The book is called Damaged and it’s about Los Angeles. It starts with a color sequence shot in downtown on a rainy night, and switches to B&W for most of the rest of the book.
To give you some thought it's like an introspection and a way to understand how the city works, how I, individually as a skateboarder and photographer interact with it but also how we interact with it collectively.
Far from being political I tried to subtly underline the "American condition" (specially in the first color sequence in downtown) and more generally how modern society is evolving.
Generally I’m trying to capture a large pattern of experiences. Most of the time it’s a quick feeling or emotion that I would forget if I didn’t have my camera. I really follow my intuition and I’m trying to not force it too much. I’m not taking photographs of a specific subject, and I don’t think the subject is important in my work.
I say ‘work’ but I see it more like a practic - like a practice of my eye and a practice of my gaze that help to understand the world I evolve in.
Skateboarding is intentionally underlying all this but I didn’t want to do a ‘skate book’. Both skateboarding and photography are so much connected in my practice in the way of time consuming, obsession but also as a way of expression or free space.
The title Damaged can be interpreted differently; it’s mainly about the city of Los Angeles condition, a city who expands enormously and where the social divisions are so noticeable that they enter into our daily routine.
I shot all these photographs between 2022 and 2025 while on skate trips for Last Resort.’
